Chang-rae Lee talks dystopian future of 'On Such a Full Sea'

Chang-rae Lee's new novel, "On Such a Full Sea," is set in a futuristic Baltimore calledl B-Mor.

Chang-rae Lee's new novel, "On Such a Full Sea," is set in a futuristic Baltimore calledl B-Mor. (Ramsay de Give, Chicago Tribune)

Kevin Nance

In his previous novels — including “Native Speaker” (1995), “Aloft” (2004) and “The Surrendered,” a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize — Chang-rae Lee has established a strong reputation as a polished and imaginative chronicler of the Asian-American experience. Lee continues to explore that theme in his latest novel, “On Such a Full Sea,” but this time it takes an unexpected turn into the distant future.

In "On Such a Full Sea" — the title is from a line in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" — Lee imagines an America divided into three distinct and aggressively segregated cultures. The residents of B-Mor, a factory settlement in what was once the environmentally devastated city of Baltimore, are descendants of Chinese workers brought to North America to raise food for the wealthy natives who live in the luxurious precincts known as the Charters. Outside these prosperous neighborhoods are the Counties, where lawlessness, hunger and disease run rampant.

When a young man named Reg disappears mysteriously from B-Mor, his girlfriend, a young woman named Fan, does the unthinkable: She leaves B-Mor in search of Reg. Her experiences in the Counties, and later among the morally suspect millionaires of the Charters, are narrated collectively by the citizens of B-Mor, who follow her every move with a kind of rapt horror increasingly roiled by stirrings of envy.

Printers Row Journal caught up with Lee, born in South Korea and now a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, for a telephone interview from his home in New Jersey. Here's an edited transcript of our chat.

Q: "On Such a Full Sea" seems to represent a fairly distinct shift in your style; certainly you're not known as a writer of dystopian or science fiction.

A: I didn't set out to write a book that is, on the surface, so different. I originally wanted to write a novel about contemporary China. But I latched onto this idea of populating derelict or abandoned urban areas with a colony of foreigners. So I kind of mixed the two ideas and brought this group of Chinese settlers to a future Baltimore. But I only set it in the future because the idea — that the American government would allow such a group to be transported over — seemed implausible. So I set it in the future out of narrative necessity, rather than conceiving it as a "different" novel in a different mode.

Q: However you got there, you ended up with a sort of post-apocalyptic story. Were there books that suggested ways of going about what you wanted to do? I'm thinking of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" and P.D. James' "The Children of Men."

A: Well, I'd read a lot of dystopian novels, by Orwell, Atwood and others. But I didn't have them in mind here, really. I was just asking questions about this particular community, as I always do in my novels. Who are these people? What are their concerns? How has their situation formed them, or maybe deformed them? But of course I had to do a little bit more world-building here, because it's an unfamiliar world. But that was the only difference for me. Ultimately, I was interested in the same kind of psychological and moral questions in relation to my characters.

Q: Let's talk about that world-building. This is a world that has a lot of specific conditions, not least of which is this group of cordoned-off neighborhoods in what used to be Baltimore, where the people are producing food for the wealthy. And then there's the third group outside of all that, which is very —

A: Lawless, yes. Those are the people who have been left to their own devices in what are known as the Counties. It's a very divided world by class and wealth, and once divided, those worlds evolve and develop into extreme versions of themselves. In the factory settlements in B-Mor, it's very regimented but safe, but also a little repressed. In the Charter villages, they have everything, but they're also crazy, absurd, bizarre and given to strange practices. The way I structured it is based on the things in our own culture that give me anxiety.

Q: What things?

A: Income inequality. The huge disparity between people who have means and people who don't. And the consequences of that inequality: lack of education, lack of health care, diminished opportunity, zero mobility. That's what I was thinking about in terms of this three-part world of the novel. And of course I'm painting those worlds, but ultimately I'm interested in the people inside them, how they conduct themselves, and the kinds of beliefs and practices they have because of where they are. Morality gets skewed depending on where you are in these worlds.

Q: So what you're telling me is that you haven't become a science fiction writer.

A: No, I'm not terribly interested in the mechanics of how that place came to be. I'm more interested in the people there after it's gotten to be the way it is and how that reveals the human condition in that environment. I try not to spend too much time in the novel on the nuts and bolts of these worlds; there's just enough so that you can believe they exist. But the real action is the human interaction.

Q: At the same time, a lot of readers will pick up this book because of its conceptual novelty, whereas maybe they wouldn't read a story set in "the real world," in which the same human dynamics are explored.

A: Sure. What's fun about a dystopian novel is that we can enjoy and be entertained. But that world is only slightly different, right? It's familiar enough to be recognizable, and skewed enough to give us pause. I hope that my novel does enough of that, but then focuses the reader on what we read books for. We want to see how people act and react. Novels aren't manuals on science or technology. Of course I realize that certain science fiction books are technically oriented and do that very detailed world-building, and that's fine. But I think the reader will realize early on that this is not exactly that sort of book.

Q: There's one intersection between the world-building part and the human-psychology part that strikes me very strongly here. You create an analog for the relationship between "gated communities" in our real world and the desire for safety and protection from "the outside," whatever that might be, and of course the effect of that on one's soul, for lack of a better word.

A: Yes, in the perfect insulation that one can find within a cloistered community, particularly one of relative wealth, there's always a trade-off, a compromise. And the compromise is being cut off from the lives and often the struggles of others, the realities of what's out there in the world, the truth of what's happening around us.

That's something I wrote a lot about in my third novel, "Aloft" — this bubble mentality in which there's abundant food, there's safety, there's comfort, but there's also a peril in not wanting any longer to know what's happening outside, much less having the means to do anything about it.

Q: But in those cloisters there are stirrings of hunger for a sort of freedom of the spirit — a realization that although we're safe and free of material want, that's not all we need.

A: Absolutely. That's exactly the sort of rumblings I wanted to allow in that community and in the voice in this novel. The word "freedom" is pivotal here. It's not political freedom, exactly; I don't think the people of B-Mor would even know what that would mean. I think it's more a freedom of the imagination. That's why they're so curious about Fan and what she does and can do. She represents not just action but the dream of action, and that's what they're yearning for — a way to think about themselves in a way that's not so circumscribed and predictable.

Q: Of course we can't give away the ending, but it certainly doesn't resolve itself in the way we might expect.

A: (Laughs.) No, there's no clear resolution of what's going to happen to Fan, but I wanted to keep it that way, because I wanted to leave the reader with a sense of hope, even if that hope is not fully justified.

We hope that Fan is on the right trajectory, that something good will happen for her, and that, in reflection, maybe we're on the right trajectory, too. We haven't had a revolution. We're not rebelling outright. But maybe the first seeds are there for a certain kind of deep questioning about where we are.

Q: Are you conscious of the phenomenon of "The Hunger Games" young-adult novels?

A: Not very much. My daughters, I think, have read it, but I haven't, nor have I seen the movies.

Q: I mention it because early on, I had some expectation that Fan would go off and have adventures along similar lines as Katniss Everdeen in "The Hunger Games."

A: (Laughs.) A lot of derring-do?

Q: Well, Fan is a physically very competent person. She has a certain amount of nerve, a fearlessness and some passion. There's a sense that she might do something heroic.

A: But it doesn't really happen. (Laughs.) I never thought of her as a typical kind of hero. And again, this has to do with who's telling the story. Wherever she goes, Fan is more of a mirror, a lens on the people she meets. They try to take advantage of her, they try to love her, all these different things. She's just sort of there, and ultimately that's her talent: her persistence and doggedness. But I never saw her as someone who would be an action hero. (Laughs.)

Q: Maybe that's for the sequel.

A: Maybe she could get a bow and arrow! (Laughs.)

Q: Seriously, could there be a sequel? The ending does seem to suggest the possibility.

A: I haven't really thought about it. I suppose I'd consider it if I thought it would take Fan into not only a different world, but also different ideas. If she could do that, then yes.